Roger Hartley (J.R.Hartley@cbl.leeds.ac.uk)
Wed, 17 Feb 1999 12:14:10 +0000
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 12:14:10 +0000 From: Roger Hartley <J.R.Hartley@cbl.leeds.ac.uk> Subject: Pondering
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A short pragmatic response to some of David's 'thoughts to ponder'. In
education, selection procedures usually support the expectation that
admitted students have sufficient knowledge and abilities to benefit from a
course (so maybe individual differences become,at least in principle,
manageable). Also there are so many resources available to support course
content...books, papers, the Internet (?).. so the major teaching problem
in my experience is developing student knowledge, skills and perhaps even
wisdom from the information that students peruse and have access to.
Further, teachers are responsible for classes of students, usually so many
that only scant attention can be given to individual differences, but
students also communicate fairly freely so that learning, at least in part
becomes a collaborative enterprise (though this is usually underplayed).
So what should be the computer based response? A move towards, not the
generation of yet more material playing lip service to interactivity, but
developing the computer as a (collaborative) learning facilitator with
which students, and instructors, can contribute and interact...OK but how?
Students have to move from acquisition to knowledge structuring, to its
augumentation via thinking/reasoning, to becoming constructive agents
through assignments which contribute to the curriculum itself as well as to
the learning/developmental experience. Individual differences can look
after themselves in a communicative environment and are to be welcomed in
any collaborative enterprise.
So I would argue for a more realistic analysis of the teaching/learning
context, for paying attention to levels of generality/abstraction that
bring structure to knowledge (as do David's schemes) and so generate
self-questioning (e.g. related to classification, comparison and process).
Discussion assignments can lead to arguemntation and viewpoint/evaluation
where the techniques and components that make up the argument(say) can
encourage 'relection' and 'metacognition' (I realise these terms are loose).
We can only partially design such systems at present (we are making a
modest attempt and find it slow going) and I'm a bit sceptical of the
approach in David's suggestions 1,2 and 3. I'm more in favour of 4 though
much more iterative research is needed into collaborative methods and
models (perhaps using crude tool like WebCT--which we are also doing) and a
greater enthusiasm on the part of teachers to exploit these techniques
before we can have greater certainty our designs for computer based
materials, facilities and tools will prove effective and be assimilated
into mainstream education.
Regards to all discussants.
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